The Wave Continues!

My ride across the tidal wave that is COMICS continues to carry toward awesome things.  Sure…I have to avoid the occasional reef and a shark or two but it’s all been worth it so far and I’m looking forward to many MANY more years of this.

Last Thursday after a full day of work then a full evening of being Mr. Mom I finally sat down to get some coloring done. I had originally promised a number of pages to be delivered by Monday the 29th so I knew I was looking at a long night of work and a crazy weekend pushing my Wacom stylus around.  I sat and wiggled the mouse to wake up the computer which had placed itself into sleep mode.

. . . . .nothing happened.  I figured maybe it had crashed or frozen during a routine virus scan or something and that it had just happened to have happened during a sleep mode.  After a few minutes of fiddling with it I decided is was best to reboot.  After the regular boot memory test…it dumped itself back into the reboot cycle. And that’s where the loop began. It was clear that there was a MASSIVE problem with my PC.  Later that night my fears proved true. Complete mother board failure.  No data loss…but the motherboard was completely destroyed.   Crash pan to Monday night/Tuesday morning at 3 a.m.  I finally made it through the gauntlet of setting up a new computer.  All the installs and preferences were set and I was once again in the position to work.

Oi!

Now it’s back to work!  I’m working now on a character that has never seen color in a comic book before.  That carries with it a huge responsibility of setting a baseline for the characters and story line.  In the future when the book is colored by other artists they’re going to refer to my colors to tell them where to start out.  So I’m really trying to put a LOT of thought into the pallet, the design and how I handle my style.  While I’m going through this I thought I might share with you a few of the sites and color tricks I use.

There are a million and one (probably more actually) websites that provide services from a color hunter to random color generators and everything in between. I promise you though…the most comprehensive free tool for helping you build a pallet and theme is Adobe’s www.kuler.adobe.com.

It provides a color hunter (you upload an image and it creates a pallet using the photo’s most dominate colors), an interactive color wheel, forums and SO much more.  and, again…it’s completely free. Plus…being backed by Adobe you know it’s going to be awesome (not to mention it interacts directly with your Adobe programs).  This site is at the VERY least a must visit for anyone involved with color.

Several years ago I took a painting class and while I was terrible with the brush and canvas I did learn a LOT about color, how I observe it and how it effects me. One great trick that I learned there was in creating a color viewing window to discover what a color TRULY looks like.  Something that people often times don’t realize is that all the colors you see every day effect the colors around them.  The light bounces around and reflects colors all around. Your blue coffee mug is reflecting down on to you gray/green desktop.  The trick is SEEING that color.  Once you really SEE it…you can begin to understand it. Then you can reproduce it. I’d like you to try this out this week and post a comment back here this week to let me know what you discovered.  Here’s how to create the color viewing window and how to use it.

Take a 6″ square piece of a neutral colored piece of matte board (or cardboard, card stock or any other stock that’s rigid) and cut a half inch square out of the middle. (that was easy!) Now hold that card up to things and try to isolate individual colors.  But don’t just hold it up to a bunch of stuff and say, “GRAY! PURPLE! BLUE! ANOTHER GRAY!”  Hold that window up and really analyze the colors you see.  Here’s an example.

We all enjoyed Superman Returns, right?? Of course we did.  Here’s one of the movie posters.

The Superman Poster

A fine image with some great drama. Kiss her, Superman!! KISS HER!!  Anyway…take your viewing window and hold it over the image like so:

Place your viewing window over the image

Now pick out a color that you can fill in the entire window.how about this spot here on Sup’s neck?  A nice…looks like an orange.

Select a specific color

That looks good.  Now…lets really look at that hue that we see. Forget everything else.  There’s not a poster, no drama and certainly no weak story line about Lex Luthor destroying the United stated with a green rock and a harpoon.

Now isolate and study the color carefully

What we’re left with is this block of color.  But how would you describe that? (at this point…feel free to post in the comments section your description of this color)  Of course everyone’s monitor is showing a slightly different set of pixels but on my screen I see a deep, warm sienna with a slight overtone of some yellows.  Now imagine what you would do to recreate that SPECIFIC color.  What would that involve?  What would cause that color to exist?  You will soon have a beter idea of the colors around you beyond the typical, “BLACK! RED! GREEN!” etc.  Try carrying the viewing window around with you for a few days. You’ll be surprised of what you discover about color and how it lives and breaths around you.

One more thing for the night and it’s back to coloring for me.  The nominees for the CBG Fan Awards were announced recently and our very own Brian Miller and HiFi Colour Design has been nominated!!  They were nominated on the basis of their amazing work on books such as Magog, Booster Gold, Wonder Woman, Batman Brave and the Bold and many many more.  I encourage each and everyone one of my readers to head over and vote for their favorits artist in each category and I hope that you remember HiFi when you get to the Colorist section.  To get to the ballot, please click here.  Tell all your friends! Vote HiFi!

Have a colorful week!